It's magical thinking to imagine that the reason unspeakable things are being perpetrated by younger and younger people is that they've fallen under the influence of seductive, lascivious, prurient, and violent material in books, films, television. A great deal of this type of censorship has to do with absolving parents of responsibility - parents who just plop their kids in front of the television and leave them there hour upon hour.
John Irving...I suddenly realized what small towns are. They are places where you grow up with the peculiar-you live next door to the strange and the unlikely for so long that everything and everyone become commonplace.
John IrvingMore than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina.
John IrvingAll I say is: Let us leave les folles alone; let's just leave them be. Don't judge them. You are not superior to them - don't put them down.
John IrvingIn an episodic treatment, such as a teleplay is, you have the ability to do what you can do in a novel, which is flash back and flash forward in the same instant, in the same scene, in the same voice.
John IrvingI'm not at all contemporary, not even modern, and the fact that I would be so quaintly attracted to that wrestling rule makes me, I suppose, seem all the more old-fashioned. I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.
John Irving...every study of the gods, of everyone's gods, is a revelation of vengeance towards the innocent.
John IrvingI write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft.
John IrvingHere is the trap you are in.... And it's not my trap—I haven't trapped you. Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you—because you know how to perform them—have no choice, either. What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman's freedom of choice, too. If abortion was legal, a woman would have a choice—and so would you. You could feel free not to do it because someone else would. But the way it is, you're trapped. Women are trapped. Women are victims, and so are you.
John IrvingDon't forget this, too: Rumors aren't interested in the unsensational story; rumors don't care what's true.
John IrvingYou take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.
John IrvingWhen people say that German or any other language is romantic... all they really mean is that they've enjoyed a past in the language
John IrvingYou're nice,' Cushie told him, squeezing his hand. 'And you're my oldest friend.' But they both must have known that you can know someone all your life and never quite be friends.
John IrvingYou know, people think you have to be dumb to skip rope for 45 minutes. No, you have to be able to imagine something else. While you're skipping rope, you have to be able to see something else.
John IrvingAll the unimaginative assholes in the world who imagine that Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare because it was impossible from what we know about Shakespeare of Stratford that such a man would have had the experience to imagine such things - well, this denies the very thing that separates Shakespeare from almost every other writer in the world: an imagination that is untouchable and nonstop.
John IrvingGrant us safe lodging, and holy rest,” Mrs. Grogan was saying, “and peace at last.” Amen, thought Wilbur Larch, the Saint of St. Cloud’s, who was seventy-something, and an ether addict, and who felt that he’d come a long way and still had a long way to go.
John IrvingI always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.
John IrvingWhatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel.
John IrvingI was brought up in a community, in a family that valued such things as good manners, and I still do.
John IrvingIt doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.
John IrvingMaybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer's irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.
John IrvingWhen someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.
John IrvingYou cannot drive with your eyes in the rear-view mirror… But dignity is difficult to maintain. Stamina requires constant upkeep. Repetition is boring. And you pay for grace.
John IrvingI am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.
John IrvingThis is a writer’s lesson: To learn that the sounds that we imagine can be the clearest, loudest sounds of all.
John IrvingOwen Meany believed that “coincidence” was a stupid, shallow refuge sought by stupid, shallow people who were unable to accept the fact that their lives were shaped by a terrifying and awesome design – more powerful and unstoppable than the Yankee Flyer. (a train)
John IrvingDeath, it seems," Garp wrote, "does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.
John IrvingIn a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?
John IrvingI have a process that I seem to always, to some degree, as a writer, adhere to, but I certainly have never imposed the way I write a novel on my students. When I had students, I never said, "You should never start writing a novel until you have the last sentence." I never did that, and I wouldn't do it now, but people now seem so interested in the process [of writing fiction] that I have to constantly make it clear when I describe mine that I'm not being prescriptive. I'm not proselytizing.
John IrvingI have learned that the consequences of our past actions are always interesting; I have learned to view the present with a forward-looking eye.
John IrvingIf you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.
John IrvingYou live your life at the time you live it -- you don't have much of an overview when what's happening to you is still happening.
John IrvingAmbition robs you of your childhood. The moment you want to become an adult—in any way—something in your childhood dies.
John IrvingI always know more about the ending, even the aftermath to the ending, than I know about the beginning. And so there's a construction that works from back to front.
John Irving